Footnotes (linked to from other pages)
• At the very worst a victim
I say ""at the very worst a victim" because most people in fact don't get hurt in TM. The truth is that most people drop the practice very quickly after starting. Others practice TM and indeed get some relaxation benefit. However, others incur serious psychological damage and have their lives seriously distorted and, occasionally, destroyed. There is a whole spectrum of impact. But there's nothing special about TM once you pull the curtain aside, and it's just not worth the risk.
• Trance induction script
A "trance induction script" is just patter that has been found effective in inducing trance. The script may also contain suggestions that are to be acted out in and/or after trance. The trance induction script is either memorized and then said aloud to the trance inductee (as with TM), or it can be read from printed text, or it can be listened to by the trance inductee on (for example) a cassette tape.
• Mental reservation
A mental reservation is "the withholding, or failing to disclose, something that affects a statement, promise, etc., and which, if disclosed, would materially change its import" (Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary). Basically using a mental reservation is "lying through omission." U.S. President Clinton used a mental reservation when he said "I never had sex with that woman!" He was privately and intentionally using a different definition of "sex" than he knew was being used by his questioners. His purpose in doing so was to mislead, i.e. to lie. TM teaching is rife with mental reservations. The teachers don't tell you everything because you "aren't ready for it yet." They mean well, they are merely treating you as a spiritual child. They feel that they may do you harm if they tell you things that you "aren't ready" to understand yet, thus possibly scaring you off from receiving the "benefits" of TM.
• No exceptions to the puja
Mahesh and his organizations have endured pressure at times to remove the requirement that the "puja" be performed as part of the "personal instruction." For example, when they are trying to get into a prison to teach TM to inmates at government expense. Mahesh has remained consistently adamant that the ceremony must be performed.
• Approval required
Whenever you apply for a TM course, someone at your local TM center will have to approve your application. For the really advanced courses, such as the "sidhis course", someone at TM headquarters will also have to approve your application. What is happening is that the TM organization is starting to weed out the people who are "too weak" to handle "unstressing." But the fact of being "approved" for a course is not a good predictor as to whether you will have difficulty with the extra "unstressing" induced by the extra trance, dissociation, and the unusual ideation introduced at the course that you are applying for.
• The Science of Creative Intelligence (SCI)
The "Science of Creative Intelligence" (SCI) is one of Mahesh's major efforts to mask his religious dogma in pseudoscience. It consists of hours and hours of videotaped lectures, in which Mahesh spins vague scientific analogies, attempting to lend a pretense of scientific validity to his spiritual doctrines.
• Mahesh's own university
The "Maharishi University of Management"(MUM) was originally called " Maharishi International University " (MIU). You can read a former MIU physics professor's comments about MIU, in which he says "Because of the strong authoritarian (essentially cultic) aspects of the movement, only results supporting ideas generated by the movement leadership could receive any hearing. The ‘scientific research' is without objectivity and is at times simply untrue."
• The Golden Domes
The "Golden Domes" are two domed structures, painted a golden color, that were built at the MUM campus. The women practice their "sidhi program" in one dome, the men in another. You have to have a security badge to get in. One big reason for the security badge is that the "sidhas" may act and sound like crazy people during their "program", something that outsiders might not understand. Another reason for the badges is to keep out people who have been blacklisted for heresy.
• Cult Leadership 101
Derren Brown is a master of a classic branch of stage magic called "Mentalism." You can find many excerpts from his performancess on YouTube.
A mentalist is a performer who simululates having supernatural powers. As described in that article, a mentalist uses...
...mental acuity, cold reading , warm reading, hot reading, principles of stage magic, hypnosis and/or suggestion to present the illusion of mind reading, psychokinesis, extra-sensory perception, precognition, clairvoyance or mind control.
In other words, a mentalist uses the exact same techniques that a cult leader uses. The only difference is that the mentalist is honest about it all being an act.
Among other skills, Brown is a master of the techniques of surreptitious "quick trance induction", such as the one used in this video. You've seen examples of surreptitious quick trance induction yourself on television, probably many times. I'm talking about some of the televised evangelists doing "healing services." First there is the prepping of the audience. A lot of people will go into a trance from just listening to the rhythm and tone of the preaching, and also from listening to the particular type of droning organ music that is played (you may have noticed that all of the "healers" use the same type of organ music).
Then when a person comes up for healing the preacher gets right in his face and shouts "HEAL!!!" while simultaneously placing his hand on the person's forehead and pushing his head back, and all of this being done while also pushing the person's whole body back into the arms of the preacher's assistants. This creates a sudden overload of the person's cognitive facilities and the result is a dissociative (trance) state. And because it has been suggested to the person many times that this will result in a healing he then he indeed experiences himselves as having been healed.
It is in his "Instant Conversion" performance that Brown shows us how to be a cult leader. Brown pretends to be someone who has had a spiritual awakening and who can give others the same sort of spiritual awakening just by touching them. He invites a group of people who are skeptics about "spirituality" to a discussion on the subject.
What's happening in the video? A lot of things. By the time we see him with his audience he has planted a lot suggestions about his ability. Then when he starts speaking his whole manner is calm and soothing and "safe." His voice in particular is calm and soothing and only very subtly modulated at all. This is all trance inducing in many people and some of the people go into a light trance.
Which sounds pretty weird. He can put people into a "light trance" just by talking soothingly? This sounds a bit hard to accept because we place very strong esoteric connotations on the word "trance." However, we can take the spin off of the word by using the word "dissociation" instead, because "trance" is just a form of "dissociation." As described in this article:
Dissociation is the disconnection from full awareness of self, time, and/or external circumstances. It is a complex neuropsychological process.Dissociation exists along a continuum from normal everyday experiences to disorders that interfere with everyday functioning.
Common examples of normal dissociation are: highway hypnosis (a trance-like feeling that develops as the miles go by), "getting lost" in a book or a movie so that one loses a sense of passing time and surroundings, and daydreaming.
You probably go into a mild dissociative state many times a day. This is completely normal. For example, when you get lost in a movie you are dissociated. This is because you are experienceing a "disconnection from full awareness of self, time, and/or external circumstances."
This completely reasonable because there is nothing unusual about going into a light trance. "Trance" is just a form of dissociation. You probably go into one several times a day. A "light trance" is a mild dissociative state . Mild dissociative states are quite normal. When you catch yourself day-dreaming you have just come out of a mild dissociative state, i.e. out of a light trance.
He's watching the audience and notices the woman in the front row beginning to show symptoms of trance. He engages her in conversation, and then suddenly darts his hand close to her head. Because she is already well along this creates a cognitive overload and she goes into a trance. Brown has performed a quick trance induction.
She then indeed has a spiritual experience because it has been many time previously suggested to her that she should have on. Other people hear her describe this experience and it reinforces the strength of Brown's carefully planted suggestions that he can give people spiritual experiences.
Then he takes a break and invites people who aren't buying all of this to leave if they want to. All he is doing is getting rid of the people who haven't proven to be susceptible to his methods. He doesn't want them around because their lack of acceptance might break the mood that he has carefully been building up.
Then he picks someone else who he notices has been responding. He gets the man to stand up, face away, and close his eyes. Brown then plants the suggestion that the man will fall backwards. He plants this suggestion by saying "Don't worry about falling back, I'll catch you if that happens." Sure enough the guy falls back and has his own spiritual experience.
Which reinforces the suggestion in the rest of the audience that they might have a spiritual experience too! After that the thing just snowballs.
Brown has just demonstrated how extraordinarily easy it is to induce a spiritual experience in people and to convince them that you have extraordinary spiritual powers. If Brown had wanted to start a cult at that moment then some of those people might have ended up being his nucleus of adherents. Fortunately, Brown is just trying to demonstrate how frighteningly easy this sort of thing is.
But there are many social predators who have also developed such skills to a virtuoso level. It's pretty scary stuff.
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